Album cover art and design for vGren – F*ckphone

Hey guys! How is it going? Today I’d like to show you my recent project – album cover art and design for vGren’s new release – F*ckphone. It’s the second artwork I did for him, the first one was Superman on DMT.

About a year ago I decided I should do not only vector art but digital paintings too. So this project was almost 100% painted in Photoshop. The client wanted this design to be supper trippy so I thought it would be cool to have this dude who is tripping balls in his room that has totally gone wild! Below is the rough sketch.

F*ckphone by vGren at Spiral Trax - sketch

vGren said he wanted some mermaids to be in the scene. I wanted to speed up the process a bit so I’ve used Adobe Fuse (a software to generate 3D humans), made some random woman body there, imported it in Blender and added the tail instead of legs. Here is my super-rough model. I’m no 3D expert so when I was adjusting the pose of the characters their lower jaws happened to be outside the mouth lol. So here is the 3D I was using as a reference. I know the posing is not perfect and the next time I use this technique I will sure be more precise :)

F*ckphone by vGren at Spiral Trax - 3D mermaids reference

Below is the black&white painting. I’m not always sure what color scheme I want to use so I prefer making the b/w version first and then using Color blending mode in Photoshop (when you paint in a separate layer and everything below absorbs the color from that top layer but all the tones are preserved) to find out what works best.

F*ckphone by vGren at Spiral Trax -  black&white painting

I decided to stick to this yellow, orange, pink and purple palette. It appeared very trippy to me. But something was lacking.

F*ckphone by vGren at Spiral Trax - color - work in progress

The client wanted the artwork to have this strong acid feel so I added more contrast and more bright colors. Here is what the final image loos like.

F*ckphone by vGren at Spiral Trax - final cover art

Lastly after looking through a bunch of fonts and showing them to vGren we decided to use this one for the lettering.

F*ckphone by vGren at Spiral Trax - album cover art and design

Generally the project went very smooth and I’m looking forward collaborating with vGen and Michael Acid (check out his awesome goatrance podcast!) who was the project manager again :)

If you have any questions about this artwork feel free to ask in the comments. And if you are looking for a album cover artist for your music I’m open for new projects – hit me up at verner.andrei@gmail.com!

Finally, if you want to have a copy of this painting (without the lettering) printed on textile with UV-paint so it reacts to fluorescent light and glows like crazy, check out my Etsy store!

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